im/chat

Sonus bought Taqua for about $20 million. Taqua builds a Class 4/5 voice switch that has been around a long while with 400 customers globally (a little less than BSFT). "Total revenue was $28.3 million and $25.2 million for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2015 and 2014, respectively. Total revenue was $16.8 million for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2016." Taqua had pivoted to Voice over Wireless recently.

Facebook Messanger is used by 900 million people in form or another (desktop, laptop, tablet, iOS, Android, Windows). Messenger already rolled out voice and video calls via the chat app. "Mark Zuckerberg announced that Messenger already made up 10 percent of all mobile VoIP calls globally," according to TechCrunch. Now you can "start a group VoIP audio call from any group chat." Conference calls started via group chat.

After a 27 hour trip to Enterprise Connect, I can safely say that we have an unqualified me-too business. Video conferencing and collaboration - now called meetings and workflow - were printed on every booth. Here is what I saw.

Cisco demonstrated Spark, which I thought was for SMB, but is being pitched to Enterprise especially with its big hook into Salesforce.

You read about disruption in other industries with household names like Dropbox, Uber, AirBnb and Netflix. Telecom is being picked apart the same way Craigslist started the revenue decline for newspapers.

Some folks think I am picking on the VoIP space (see this post). Maybe I am. Hosted PBX started for me in 2003 when Broadsoft's second customer rolled out its platform and signed me up as their first agent. It has been a struggle ever since.

End of year buzz around unified communications (UC, UCaaDS, Hostd PBX, Hosted UC) is ramping up. All part of the predictions and trend watching for 2016.

First, I have a shout out to my bud, Alex Doyle for this very nice video (commercial) for VZ UC&C. I have no idea if he is pitching the Cisco HCS platform or the Broadsoft VCE that he spent years sweating over.